There isn't really anything open source that I know of that is good at multi-user password management. I've seen enterprise appliances that offer this, but those are upwards of $10,000 for a glorified 1U rack PC with locking bolts.
The best way I'd go about this is have the two top security guys in the firm build a Linux or BSD box with whole disk encryption that is locked away somewhere.
As an alternative to Linux, one could use Windows and BitLocker, then VMWare Server or Workstation. This provides protection from physical attack, although nothing is 100%.
This box would have multiple VMs on it for isolation.
One VM would have a RDBMS which can encrypt tables/rows/columns that can be backed up somehow, with the keys obviously stored well away. This would allow for database backups without compromising the stored passwords.
The second one would have the backend web application and Web server, each running in different security contexts, so an Apache compromise won't get much.
As for authentication, that exercise is left to the reader. Username and password over SSL is the minimum.
Each technology is double-edged, but IMHO, the benefits outweigh the cons. Yes, in some scenario, the government could press a button and strand every single citizen by taking away their cars, but they can easily do that now (demand GM send the "OMG, I'm stolen, stop right now" signal to all OnStar vehicles, and it would accomplish the same thing.)
Personally, if given the choice, I'd rather be able to get in a vehicle, read a book, and catch a snooze on the ride to work than have to actively deal with the general insanity. There are just too many benefits for everyone involved with self-driving cars for this technology to be ignored, especially with cities that cannot or will not expand road infrastructure.
It would also eliminate the arms race of people having to buy bigger and bigger vehicles so they have a better chance of surviving a wreck. If an AI is moving vehicles around, what would matter would be the creature comforts in the vehicle, and not the size of the gold-plated plastic testicles hanging off the rear bumper.
Cars would be chosen for what amenities they sported, be it an entertainment center, a wet bar, couches that jack-knifed into beds so one could sleep during a long commute, showers, and so on. On a long commute, one could just get out of bed at home, hop in the vehicle, take a shower and eat on the trip, saving time.
Given a choice between Google's AI, or the guy in the other vehicle who is probably incapacitated by some form of recreational substances, i'll take the AI. We already deal with hostile/oblivious/incapable people behind the wheel. At least the AI will be consistent and improve over time with regard to driving decisions.
Where AIs succeed where people fail are reaction times. Where a rear-ender occurs because someone weaved in a lane, paniced, and brake-checked, an AI would have already detected the event and the vehicle would have slowed down, possibly announcing via some wireless mesh about the emergency stop, causing other car AIs to be able to slow down without as much force. For the most part, the only communication between meat drivers on the road is a middle finger.
There would be so many things that would save money with cars and roads designed for auto-driving cars:
Cars about to break down can be moved off highways and to nearby garages before they obstruct traffic. If they do obstruct traffic, things can be easily routed around.
Intersections with pedestrians and bicyclists would be better for them. Cars WILL stop and STAY stopped when the other traffic on the road gets the green light. No buzzing cyclists, no mirrors brushing pedestrian shoulders, no ignored crosswalks.
Intersections between highways can be made into simple four-way ones, with the car computers slowing down or speeding up traffic so cars can zoom through at near full speed without colliding.
Construction workers don't have to worry, because cars will route around them automatically.
If done right with cars having an electric subsystem, cars can pull over and refuel/recharge automatically. This would be nice for RV-ers who could sleep, read a book, troll Slashdot, or hop in the shower while letting the vehicle do the driving for them. To boot, instead of having to tow a "toad" behind the motorhome, it could follow autonomously.
It would allow people to not have to have a car, but yet have full freedom to go places, if someone set up a pool of self-driving vehicles that would be ready when the commuter needed to go places.
There are just so many transport logistic problems that would be solved for the everyday person here in the US by self-driving cars. Car in shop? Get a ride home, when the vehicle is done, it drives to the house or office ready to go.
That does get me wondering... how better will bulbs made with this high current technology save electricity compared to other types of bulbs such as CFLs?
Of course, compared to the old incandescent, they will do much better due to more light and not heat.
Then there is usable life. With more current comes more heat, and heat is what trashes ICs.
Don't forget the toolbar that usually wants to come for the ride, so one has to be very careful when clicking on the Java update icon, or else one's Web browser may have a little companion with it...
Yes, it is removable, but a security update shouldn't come with crapware.
I wish Oracle would start looking for the future. Java is a gem, but eventually it will be passed up for existing solutions (C#, Flash, HTML5 on the client end, ASP on the server end) unless Oracle does something.
For example, Java updates on Windows should automatically use MS installer files and if the user sets the option, checks the update server, fetches the MSI/MSP file, makes sure the signature is intact, and go from there. If a JVM is open, prompt the user to close it, then kill all active processes.
Yes, it would cost Oracle something for development and packaging, but they really should look long term -- Java has a lot of advantages, from being able to be used in embedded controllers, to being good sandboxes for apps (assuming proper security testing is done.)
Maybe Oracle can actually expand Java. Oracle owns silicon, so why not make a processor that is designed from the ground up for Java bytecode? Perhaps even build it into the SPARC architecture [1].
It may not be short term good, but long-term, if Oracle kept maintaining Java and kept it relevant to both consumers and IT departments, they will make money in the long run.
[1]: Of course, there are issues, but having Java be able to natively execute in hardware would help things server-side.
I'd say GSM has a number of features that are far useful for a clued customer than CDMA. Of course, in theory the differences will go away when companies move to LTE and one stream for communications (as opposed to separated voice/data.) A couple points:
Yes, I can keep my Internet connection going while using my BT headpiece and talking with a friend. Very simple, but CDMA, you talk, or use the packet radio; not both.
If the device is unlocked, I can used whatever the heck I feel like on a GSM network. Switching between my iPhone and Android phone is just a SIM card swap away. With CDMA companies, I have to call them and plead for them to switch the number to that phone, and IIRC, unless you bought the device from that provider, they will laugh in your face.
The US CDMA standard is a crippled implementation. Everywhere else in the world, the CDMA standard uses R/UIM cards. This allows people to use whatever cell phone they want, just like with GSM (provided the phone is unlocked.) This also prevents phones from other countries being used in the US.
I like GSM for the ability to use an unlocked phone I bought anywhere in the world in the US. The phone may crawl along at EDGE speed, but at least it can be used, unlike CDMA phones which have to be tossed, if one wants to change providers.
Purely IMHO of course, but what does FB have that I would go screaming in the night if I lost?
Pictures? Got backups of those.
Meeting times and events? People can find another place for that. iCloud is free and has a good calendar function.
Meeting forums? Plenty of places for that, be it G+, Web forums, Yahoo groups, or maybe even having one's own website.
Watching what friends do on a site that isn't horrid on the eyeballs? G+ is stiff competition, and worst case, there is always firing up a website and a blog.
Random comments? Twitter is there.
Private messages? Yahoo chat, AIM, ICQ, and other chats are still out there. Barring that, there is always E-mail.
FB apps? I don't play them, so am not a judge, but I'm sure some large website, somewhere would happily create an API in order for a company like Zynga to slurp up dollars in micropayments.
What FB provides is just one single contact point. If it vanished tomorrow, people would just go back to what they used in the past, or perhaps just patronize Google+, which offers almost everything that FB does, coupled with a music store, storage space, E-mail, and apps.
What would happen is what happened with the crypto industry in the 1990s, due to ITAR: It moved elsewhere. SSL? Download the module from Germany. PGP? Grab pgpi from your favorite place in Canada.
A more concrete example is how the EPA phased in pollution laws so fast that no US steel maker could survive... Steel is still being made, but it just comes from abroad.
I'm sure judges are not looking at unintended consequences here... it just means that more coding houses get made offshore, and people buy their software from places not in the US.
When MS bought out the Chevron utility and built it as an option, it made the platform attractive -- no worrying about rooting or jailbreaking. A recent XDA article showed that that functionality is going away soon.
I wish it weren't the case, but I am tired of locked down platforms, and find Android the one that sucks the least. For example, if I want to block calls/texts with iOS [1], i'm forced to jailbreak. At least with Android, I can use Mr. Number or a root-level blacklist and be done with it.
What would be ideal would be a system similar to the one used for unlocking Nexus phone bootloaders -- an obstacle that will make Joe Sixpack go "hmm, maybe I shouldn't do this", but for someone who knows their stuff, would be trivial. That way, people who don't know what they are doing are protected by the phone's security and the gatekeeper at the app store, while people who are more interested in customization can do what they want.
[1]: Yes, there are apps that supposedly do blocking, but a lot of them do nothing except create a new contact entry with [Blocked] in it.
A backdoor standard would get them an expert medal in footshooting. Eventually some other country would find the backdoor and then be able to spy on all their businesses.
This is one of the arguments that killed the Clipper Chip -- if Skipjack ever was broken, or the LEAF fields tampered with (which both happened), it would mean a foreign power would have wholesale access to US secrets.
Another downside is simple -- heterogeneous environments make life easier for the blackhats. If everything used the same architecture, it means that a low level bug that can get code executed in ring 0 (to use Intel's terms) would affect everything from the embedded device, all the way to the supercomputers. Having different architectures means that damage due to a bug similar to the F0 0F bug of yore would be limited and containable.
Apple can easily step into the corporate sector for a large revenue stream any time they wanted. Right now, they are doing well as they are, but if the existing revenue streams run low, it wouldn't be hard for them to step into the enterprise. They would need to make some changes to existing machines (such as a modified Mac Pro case that is mountable on a rack drawer with all parts easily accessible), and run an "Apple means business" campaign, and they would make definite inroads into the corporate sector. Especially if Apple licensed from MS items like Active Directory functionality like domain servers and such.
This would allow Apple to get in the enterprise without having to make a specific model like the XServe (which didn't sell well when it was killed.)
What I would like is just the ability to access my iDevice's raw filesystem and the functionality I get by jailbreaking. I don't care if I have to buy an iOS membership to get this -- I want to be able to pop a command line, grab an E-mail attachment, edit it, encrypt it with a gpg key on the device, then scp it from the phone (likely in/var/mobile) to the remote device. Yes, this might be possible if one has enough apps that cooperate with each other, but it is far easier to just have a command shell where one can run mutt, vi, gpg, then sftp right in succession.
One reason Apple has not allowed this is because of the perception of compromise in the open Android ecosystem. If the JB-like functionality was limited to developers or some way where it wouldn't bite Apple in the behonkus if someone started bawling that their device got compromised because of a JB-functionality exploit, then this would be a must have. Even if it was something called a beta function, this would make iOS devices a lot more useful.
I'm sure this can be implemented in a way to minimize piracy (mainly because people with open devices would be known.) This way, someone going crazy with Installious would be quickly found and JB-equivilent access could be removed, relieving Apple of the pressure by app developers to keep making it harder to have a working jailbreak.
Perhaps another anti-piracy mechanism like Android's LVL that doesn't depend on the jail. However, there are toolkits that easily work around LVL, so it isn't a 100% guarentee either.
I'd probably say embedded growth is a help with C as a language of use. C may be venerable, but there are a lot of libraries out there for it, and almost every itch has been scratched.
Plus, there are a lot of tricks one can do with C to be able to cram more code and features into a limited EEPROM space than they can do with Java or a high level language that requires a VM, or a ton of abstraction to work right.
As always, if worse come to worst, there is always inline assembly.
For a small town, a small (~220 MW) plant will come very handy. It helps ensure they will be up if the grid goes down, that businesses would have a utility power guarantee, and it also gives clean power without having to deal with a coal or other fossil fuel plant.
I keep seeing these pieces of a puzzle popping up on/. that would solve the core problems our culture faces. A wind turbine to pull water from the air here, small reactors there, isobutane from CO2, better batteries from IBM, and self driving cars. Putting these technologies together, and we have done a lot for the transportation infrastructure. The reactors would give reliable power, which can be used to charge batteries on electric vehicles or make usable fuel for IC engines. Road congestion and even the need for a vehicle (as opposed to just renting one for a trip) would be eased by self driving cars.
I just wish some of these cool potential ideas came into practical use. Self driving cars would allow for a lot of flexibility especially.
Virtually anything electric is, be it electric heaters, refrigerators, et. al.
However, the reason why we still use gas/diesel engines is that gasoline takes up a relatively small amount of volume for the energy it gives off, even at 25% efficiency or less. Getting batteries that are are in the ball park with energy storage with volume would completely change this. Electric motors do not need an intake/exhaust system, and the cooling system can be downsized due to less waste heat.
Plus, it will be nice to have full torque at 0 RPM which electric motors can do.
Nail, hit hit. Weight is an important factor, but what is important is how much space the battery takes up with all its cooling and safety systems. If it still is competitive (or heck, within an order of magnitude) with gasoline, we have something revolutionary.
Otherwise, it will go on the shelf with supercaps and many other battery technologies that had promise, but couldn't deliver.
This would also be useful for areas such as rural parts of central Texas, where the water table is so low that drilling a reliable well is dicey, the humidity is high, and the wind is fairly constant for most of the year.
For a small farm that tries to be as off-grid as possible, other than the noise factor from windmills, this would be ideal. If the water yield is good enough, it would mean irrigation is taken care of regardless of drought conditions.
I just hope this technology doesn't just fade away as many others have in the past. There is definitely a use for this around the world, as usable fresh water becomes harder and harder to find.
I would disagree. The more communication the US has with China, and the more diplomatic friction is handled by other methods, especially in the computer intrusion department, the less chance there would be of a Sino-American war. Trust me, if people thought the Middle East was bad, it would be nothing compared to the Pacific Rim destabilizing.
The good thing is that both the US and China want to survive, and are more interested in keeping their cities and next generations intact than blind ideology. Neither nation is interested in a war with the other.
If the pissing contests are sorted out via wargames or a 2x2 Arena team in WoW, all the better. Better that than ICBMs.
Sounds crazy, but ZIP disks offered two other advantages:
1: The ability to be set read-only with a password. This was useful back in the day if one wanted a FTP server that an intruder couldn't trash the distributed files on, especially if a SCSI ZIP drive was used which had decent performance at the time.
2: The ability to use a password for protecting data which was hardware enforced. The ZIP 100 was bypassable by the hardware sleep trick, but the ZIP 250 and 750 were not, so other than LEOs with drives which ignored that bit, it was a pretty secure mechanism, especially when combined with a backup utility that did encryption.
ZIP drives were useful... of course, their time is since long gone since a USB flash drive is far more reliable and cheaper for small capacities.
I like going one step beyond CCleaner. I use sandboxie on my browsing sessions. This provides four benefits:
1: My Web browsing is redirected to another volume. This means that cookies and other stuff are not stored on my main application or data drives, but are separated. This keeps potential malware as separated as one can get from the system without resorting to actualy VMs.
2: When I close the Web browser, all stored stuff is gone, guarenteed. There is no worry about hidden cookies, LSOs, or any other third party application crap that may be stored, but might get missed by cleaning utilities. Any writes to the Registry or files are redirected and then purged at the end of the session.
3: It provides a restricted context, so malware that gets control of the Web browser doesn't get control of the rest of the user account. This is important, because newer malware can do 90% of its nasty stuff without needing root/admin rights (such as reading files and uploading them, running a botnet client as a user, spamming, DDoS-ing, and other stuff.)
4: I can block volumes and directories from access by the sandbox. This keeps malware from reading documents or being able to see drives it shouldn't. Some applications can be restricted with Net access.
I've found in my personal experience that AdBlock, SpywareBlaster (which adds kill bits and adds to browser cookie deny lists), combined with sandboxie and a decent Web browser (Chrome or Firefox) have done a great job at keeping malware at bay. AV programs are nice, but they tend to be pointless with how fast zero-days get developed.
IT is a lot more than just CPU and the amount of little switches on a die. Yes, those get better and continue to do so, but there are a lot of bottlenecks that are not going away anytime soon. Until these are dealt with, things will stay almost the same in the IT world.
Couple examples:
1: Wireless bandwidth fees. This has gotten worse as time progresses. Two years ago, my T-Mobile CLIQ had unlimited tethering. Now, if I want to transfer 500 gigs of data, I'd have to pay my provider over five digits for that month.
2: Regular bandwidth. A year ago, bandwidth might be throttled on P2P downloads. Now it is metered as well on most ISPs.
3: Backups. The enterprise has the advantage that once they pay for the LTO-5 tape drives, individual cartridges are cheap, rugged, and have a lifetime guarentee. Individuals usually don't have the cash for the drive, so have to deal with hard disks which usually have a year warranty, and there is no consumer level software to handle backups, where it knows where a specific revision of a file is on what volume, be it a primary volume, or a copy saved in a safe deposit box somewhere. The enterprise has NetBackup, TSM, Networker, and other items. So, there is a major issue with making sure data is saved safely for anyone who can't afford to stick an EMC VNX array in their garage.
In the past, tape drives were not just affordable by consumers, and kept up with hard disks, but usually had some decent software that could help find media in case of a disaster. These days, there are not any good consumer level backup utilities, especially ones that can restore bare-metal.
4: Encryption. As grows storage grows the need to protect the data from everything from tapes falling off the pickup truck to hard disk drives getting yanked out of arrays.
Just raw CPU power may help things, but that is more incremental than anything else. Right now, IT is more affected by the BYOD trend than it would be by any CPU revolution. What would stir the pot would be bandwidth increases that don't have corresponding fee hikes. Having the ability to have fiber-channel bandwidth over the WAN fabric on the cheap would revolutionize things.
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There isn't really anything open source that I know of that is good at multi-user password management. I've seen enterprise appliances that offer this, but those are upwards of $10,000 for a glorified 1U rack PC with locking bolts.
The best way I'd go about this is have the two top security guys in the firm build a Linux or BSD box with whole disk encryption that is locked away somewhere.
As an alternative to Linux, one could use Windows and BitLocker, then VMWare Server or Workstation. This provides protection from physical attack, although nothing is 100%.
This box would have multiple VMs on it for isolation.
One VM would have a RDBMS which can encrypt tables/rows/columns that can be backed up somehow, with the keys obviously stored well away. This would allow for database backups without compromising the stored passwords.
The second one would have the backend web application and Web server, each running in different security contexts, so an Apache compromise won't get much.
As for authentication, that exercise is left to the reader. Username and password over SSL is the minimum.
Each technology is double-edged, but IMHO, the benefits outweigh the cons. Yes, in some scenario, the government could press a button and strand every single citizen by taking away their cars, but they can easily do that now (demand GM send the "OMG, I'm stolen, stop right now" signal to all OnStar vehicles, and it would accomplish the same thing.)
Personally, if given the choice, I'd rather be able to get in a vehicle, read a book, and catch a snooze on the ride to work than have to actively deal with the general insanity. There are just too many benefits for everyone involved with self-driving cars for this technology to be ignored, especially with cities that cannot or will not expand road infrastructure.
It would also eliminate the arms race of people having to buy bigger and bigger vehicles so they have a better chance of surviving a wreck. If an AI is moving vehicles around, what would matter would be the creature comforts in the vehicle, and not the size of the gold-plated plastic testicles hanging off the rear bumper.
Cars would be chosen for what amenities they sported, be it an entertainment center, a wet bar, couches that jack-knifed into beds so one could sleep during a long commute, showers, and so on. On a long commute, one could just get out of bed at home, hop in the vehicle, take a shower and eat on the trip, saving time.
Given a choice between Google's AI, or the guy in the other vehicle who is probably incapacitated by some form of recreational substances, i'll take the AI. We already deal with hostile/oblivious/incapable people behind the wheel. At least the AI will be consistent and improve over time with regard to driving decisions.
Where AIs succeed where people fail are reaction times. Where a rear-ender occurs because someone weaved in a lane, paniced, and brake-checked, an AI would have already detected the event and the vehicle would have slowed down, possibly announcing via some wireless mesh about the emergency stop, causing other car AIs to be able to slow down without as much force. For the most part, the only communication between meat drivers on the road is a middle finger.
There would be so many things that would save money with cars and roads designed for auto-driving cars:
Cars about to break down can be moved off highways and to nearby garages before they obstruct traffic. If they do obstruct traffic, things can be easily routed around.
Intersections with pedestrians and bicyclists would be better for them. Cars WILL stop and STAY stopped when the other traffic on the road gets the green light. No buzzing cyclists, no mirrors brushing pedestrian shoulders, no ignored crosswalks.
Intersections between highways can be made into simple four-way ones, with the car computers slowing down or speeding up traffic so cars can zoom through at near full speed without colliding.
Construction workers don't have to worry, because cars will route around them automatically.
If done right with cars having an electric subsystem, cars can pull over and refuel/recharge automatically. This would be nice for RV-ers who could sleep, read a book, troll Slashdot, or hop in the shower while letting the vehicle do the driving for them. To boot, instead of having to tow a "toad" behind the motorhome, it could follow autonomously.
It would allow people to not have to have a car, but yet have full freedom to go places, if someone set up a pool of self-driving vehicles that would be ready when the commuter needed to go places.
There are just so many transport logistic problems that would be solved for the everyday person here in the US by self-driving cars. Car in shop? Get a ride home, when the vehicle is done, it drives to the house or office ready to go.
That does get me wondering... how better will bulbs made with this high current technology save electricity compared to other types of bulbs such as CFLs?
Of course, compared to the old incandescent, they will do much better due to more light and not heat.
Then there is usable life. With more current comes more heat, and heat is what trashes ICs.
Don't forget the toolbar that usually wants to come for the ride, so one has to be very careful when clicking on the Java update icon, or else one's Web browser may have a little companion with it...
Yes, it is removable, but a security update shouldn't come with crapware.
I wish Oracle would start looking for the future. Java is a gem, but eventually it will be passed up for existing solutions (C#, Flash, HTML5 on the client end, ASP on the server end) unless Oracle does something.
For example, Java updates on Windows should automatically use MS installer files and if the user sets the option, checks the update server, fetches the MSI/MSP file, makes sure the signature is intact, and go from there. If a JVM is open, prompt the user to close it, then kill all active processes.
Yes, it would cost Oracle something for development and packaging, but they really should look long term -- Java has a lot of advantages, from being able to be used in embedded controllers, to being good sandboxes for apps (assuming proper security testing is done.)
Maybe Oracle can actually expand Java. Oracle owns silicon, so why not make a processor that is designed from the ground up for Java bytecode? Perhaps even build it into the SPARC architecture [1].
It may not be short term good, but long-term, if Oracle kept maintaining Java and kept it relevant to both consumers and IT departments, they will make money in the long run.
[1]: Of course, there are issues, but having Java be able to natively execute in hardware would help things server-side.
I'd say GSM has a number of features that are far useful for a clued customer than CDMA. Of course, in theory the differences will go away when companies move to LTE and one stream for communications (as opposed to separated voice/data.) A couple points:
Yes, I can keep my Internet connection going while using my BT headpiece and talking with a friend. Very simple, but CDMA, you talk, or use the packet radio; not both.
If the device is unlocked, I can used whatever the heck I feel like on a GSM network. Switching between my iPhone and Android phone is just a SIM card swap away. With CDMA companies, I have to call them and plead for them to switch the number to that phone, and IIRC, unless you bought the device from that provider, they will laugh in your face.
The US CDMA standard is a crippled implementation. Everywhere else in the world, the CDMA standard uses R/UIM cards. This allows people to use whatever cell phone they want, just like with GSM (provided the phone is unlocked.) This also prevents phones from other countries being used in the US.
I like GSM for the ability to use an unlocked phone I bought anywhere in the world in the US. The phone may crawl along at EDGE speed, but at least it can be used, unlike CDMA phones which have to be tossed, if one wants to change providers.
Purely IMHO of course, but what does FB have that I would go screaming in the night if I lost?
Pictures? Got backups of those.
Meeting times and events? People can find another place for that. iCloud is free and has a good calendar function.
Meeting forums? Plenty of places for that, be it G+, Web forums, Yahoo groups, or maybe even having one's own website.
Watching what friends do on a site that isn't horrid on the eyeballs? G+ is stiff competition, and worst case, there is always firing up a website and a blog.
Random comments? Twitter is there.
Private messages? Yahoo chat, AIM, ICQ, and other chats are still out there. Barring that, there is always E-mail.
FB apps? I don't play them, so am not a judge, but I'm sure some large website, somewhere would happily create an API in order for a company like Zynga to slurp up dollars in micropayments.
What FB provides is just one single contact point. If it vanished tomorrow, people would just go back to what they used in the past, or perhaps just patronize Google+, which offers almost everything that FB does, coupled with a music store, storage space, E-mail, and apps.
What would happen is what happened with the crypto industry in the 1990s, due to ITAR: It moved elsewhere. SSL? Download the module from Germany. PGP? Grab pgpi from your favorite place in Canada.
A more concrete example is how the EPA phased in pollution laws so fast that no US steel maker could survive... Steel is still being made, but it just comes from abroad.
I'm sure judges are not looking at unintended consequences here... it just means that more coding houses get made offshore, and people buy their software from places not in the US.
When MS bought out the Chevron utility and built it as an option, it made the platform attractive -- no worrying about rooting or jailbreaking. A recent XDA article showed that that functionality is going away soon.
I wish it weren't the case, but I am tired of locked down platforms, and find Android the one that sucks the least. For example, if I want to block calls/texts with iOS [1], i'm forced to jailbreak. At least with Android, I can use Mr. Number or a root-level blacklist and be done with it.
What would be ideal would be a system similar to the one used for unlocking Nexus phone bootloaders -- an obstacle that will make Joe Sixpack go "hmm, maybe I shouldn't do this", but for someone who knows their stuff, would be trivial. That way, people who don't know what they are doing are protected by the phone's security and the gatekeeper at the app store, while people who are more interested in customization can do what they want.
[1]: Yes, there are apps that supposedly do blocking, but a lot of them do nothing except create a new contact entry with [Blocked] in it.
I stand corrected.
A backdoor standard would get them an expert medal in footshooting. Eventually some other country would find the backdoor and then be able to spy on all their businesses.
This is one of the arguments that killed the Clipper Chip -- if Skipjack ever was broken, or the LEAF fields tampered with (which both happened), it would mean a foreign power would have wholesale access to US secrets.
Another downside is simple -- heterogeneous environments make life easier for the blackhats. If everything used the same architecture, it means that a low level bug that can get code executed in ring 0 (to use Intel's terms) would affect everything from the embedded device, all the way to the supercomputers. Having different architectures means that damage due to a bug similar to the F0 0F bug of yore would be limited and containable.
Apple can easily step into the corporate sector for a large revenue stream any time they wanted. Right now, they are doing well as they are, but if the existing revenue streams run low, it wouldn't be hard for them to step into the enterprise. They would need to make some changes to existing machines (such as a modified Mac Pro case that is mountable on a rack drawer with all parts easily accessible), and run an "Apple means business" campaign, and they would make definite inroads into the corporate sector. Especially if Apple licensed from MS items like Active Directory functionality like domain servers and such.
This would allow Apple to get in the enterprise without having to make a specific model like the XServe (which didn't sell well when it was killed.)
What I would like is just the ability to access my iDevice's raw filesystem and the functionality I get by jailbreaking. I don't care if I have to buy an iOS membership to get this -- I want to be able to pop a command line, grab an E-mail attachment, edit it, encrypt it with a gpg key on the device, then scp it from the phone (likely in /var/mobile) to the remote device. Yes, this might be possible if one has enough apps that cooperate with each other, but it is far easier to just have a command shell where one can run mutt, vi, gpg, then sftp right in succession.
One reason Apple has not allowed this is because of the perception of compromise in the open Android ecosystem. If the JB-like functionality was limited to developers or some way where it wouldn't bite Apple in the behonkus if someone started bawling that their device got compromised because of a JB-functionality exploit, then this would be a must have. Even if it was something called a beta function, this would make iOS devices a lot more useful.
I'm sure this can be implemented in a way to minimize piracy (mainly because people with open devices would be known.) This way, someone going crazy with Installious would be quickly found and JB-equivilent access could be removed, relieving Apple of the pressure by app developers to keep making it harder to have a working jailbreak.
Perhaps another anti-piracy mechanism like Android's LVL that doesn't depend on the jail. However, there are toolkits that easily work around LVL, so it isn't a 100% guarentee either.
I'd probably say embedded growth is a help with C as a language of use. C may be venerable, but there are a lot of libraries out there for it, and almost every itch has been scratched.
Plus, there are a lot of tricks one can do with C to be able to cram more code and features into a limited EEPROM space than they can do with Java or a high level language that requires a VM, or a ton of abstraction to work right.
As always, if worse come to worst, there is always inline assembly.
For a small town, a small (~220 MW) plant will come very handy. It helps ensure they will be up if the grid goes down, that businesses would have a utility power guarantee, and it also gives clean power without having to deal with a coal or other fossil fuel plant.
I keep seeing these pieces of a puzzle popping up on /. that would solve the core problems our culture faces. A wind turbine to pull water from the air here, small reactors there, isobutane from CO2, better batteries from IBM, and self driving cars. Putting these technologies together, and we have done a lot for the transportation infrastructure. The reactors would give reliable power, which can be used to charge batteries on electric vehicles or make usable fuel for IC engines. Road congestion and even the need for a vehicle (as opposed to just renting one for a trip) would be eased by self driving cars.
I just wish some of these cool potential ideas came into practical use. Self driving cars would allow for a lot of flexibility especially.
As energy availability improves, so do economies.
Virtually anything electric is, be it electric heaters, refrigerators, et. al.
However, the reason why we still use gas/diesel engines is that gasoline takes up a relatively small amount of volume for the energy it gives off, even at 25% efficiency or less. Getting batteries that are are in the ball park with energy storage with volume would completely change this. Electric motors do not need an intake/exhaust system, and the cooling system can be downsized due to less waste heat.
Plus, it will be nice to have full torque at 0 RPM which electric motors can do.
Nail, hit hit. Weight is an important factor, but what is important is how much space the battery takes up with all its cooling and safety systems. If it still is competitive (or heck, within an order of magnitude) with gasoline, we have something revolutionary.
Otherwise, it will go on the shelf with supercaps and many other battery technologies that had promise, but couldn't deliver.
This would also be useful for areas such as rural parts of central Texas, where the water table is so low that drilling a reliable well is dicey, the humidity is high, and the wind is fairly constant for most of the year.
For a small farm that tries to be as off-grid as possible, other than the noise factor from windmills, this would be ideal. If the water yield is good enough, it would mean irrigation is taken care of regardless of drought conditions.
I just hope this technology doesn't just fade away as many others have in the past. There is definitely a use for this around the world, as usable fresh water becomes harder and harder to find.
I would disagree. The more communication the US has with China, and the more diplomatic friction is handled by other methods, especially in the computer intrusion department, the less chance there would be of a Sino-American war. Trust me, if people thought the Middle East was bad, it would be nothing compared to the Pacific Rim destabilizing.
The good thing is that both the US and China want to survive, and are more interested in keeping their cities and next generations intact than blind ideology. Neither nation is interested in a war with the other.
If the pissing contests are sorted out via wargames or a 2x2 Arena team in WoW, all the better. Better that than ICBMs.
Sounds crazy, but ZIP disks offered two other advantages:
1: The ability to be set read-only with a password. This was useful back in the day if one wanted a FTP server that an intruder couldn't trash the distributed files on, especially if a SCSI ZIP drive was used which had decent performance at the time.
2: The ability to use a password for protecting data which was hardware enforced. The ZIP 100 was bypassable by the hardware sleep trick, but the ZIP 250 and 750 were not, so other than LEOs with drives which ignored that bit, it was a pretty secure mechanism, especially when combined with a backup utility that did encryption.
ZIP drives were useful... of course, their time is since long gone since a USB flash drive is far more reliable and cheaper for small capacities.
I like going one step beyond CCleaner. I use sandboxie on my browsing sessions. This provides four benefits:
1: My Web browsing is redirected to another volume. This means that cookies and other stuff are not stored on my main application or data drives, but are separated. This keeps potential malware as separated as one can get from the system without resorting to actualy VMs.
2: When I close the Web browser, all stored stuff is gone, guarenteed. There is no worry about hidden cookies, LSOs, or any other third party application crap that may be stored, but might get missed by cleaning utilities. Any writes to the Registry or files are redirected and then purged at the end of the session.
3: It provides a restricted context, so malware that gets control of the Web browser doesn't get control of the rest of the user account. This is important, because newer malware can do 90% of its nasty stuff without needing root/admin rights (such as reading files and uploading them, running a botnet client as a user, spamming, DDoS-ing, and other stuff.)
4: I can block volumes and directories from access by the sandbox. This keeps malware from reading documents or being able to see drives it shouldn't. Some applications can be restricted with Net access.
I've found in my personal experience that AdBlock, SpywareBlaster (which adds kill bits and adds to browser cookie deny lists), combined with sandboxie and a decent Web browser (Chrome or Firefox) have done a great job at keeping malware at bay. AV programs are nice, but they tend to be pointless with how fast zero-days get developed.
Will the bootloader be locked or unlocked? It would be nice to have a secure variant of CM7 or CM9 on this device.
IT is a lot more than just CPU and the amount of little switches on a die. Yes, those get better and continue to do so, but there are a lot of bottlenecks that are not going away anytime soon. Until these are dealt with, things will stay almost the same in the IT world.
Couple examples:
1: Wireless bandwidth fees. This has gotten worse as time progresses. Two years ago, my T-Mobile CLIQ had unlimited tethering. Now, if I want to transfer 500 gigs of data, I'd have to pay my provider over five digits for that month.
2: Regular bandwidth. A year ago, bandwidth might be throttled on P2P downloads. Now it is metered as well on most ISPs.
3: Backups. The enterprise has the advantage that once they pay for the LTO-5 tape drives, individual cartridges are cheap, rugged, and have a lifetime guarentee. Individuals usually don't have the cash for the drive, so have to deal with hard disks which usually have a year warranty, and there is no consumer level software to handle backups, where it knows where a specific revision of a file is on what volume, be it a primary volume, or a copy saved in a safe deposit box somewhere. The enterprise has NetBackup, TSM, Networker, and other items. So, there is a major issue with making sure data is saved safely for anyone who can't afford to stick an EMC VNX array in their garage.
In the past, tape drives were not just affordable by consumers, and kept up with hard disks, but usually had some decent software that could help find media in case of a disaster. These days, there are not any good consumer level backup utilities, especially ones that can restore bare-metal.
4: Encryption. As grows storage grows the need to protect the data from everything from tapes falling off the pickup truck to hard disk drives getting yanked out of arrays.
Just raw CPU power may help things, but that is more incremental than anything else. Right now, IT is more affected by the BYOD trend than it would be by any CPU revolution. What would stir the pot would be bandwidth increases that don't have corresponding fee hikes. Having the ability to have fiber-channel bandwidth over the WAN fabric on the cheap would revolutionize things.